Chapter 3: The Three Faces of Language Proficiency

How long does it take to learn a new language? Or maybe we should ask: what does it mean to "know" a language?

When I've looked back at my experience learning Danish as a 25-year old, I was thinking 3-4 months. But then I remember the embarrassment of misunderstandings, my husband's writing job applications, my relief that I could submit my American dissertation draft (in English) as my Danish MA thesis, and that most exams were orals. Even many years later when I was trying to earn a living between real jobs, when I was told by a temp agency that I couldn't do a receptionist's job because of my (minimal) accent.

Most texts about learning a second language divide language competency into two categories: BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills, and CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency.) Most kids pick up BICS pretty quickly. I remember meeting a little 4-year-old American boy in our apartment complex in Denmark, very miserable because he couldn't communicate with the other kids. It seems like it didn't take him more than a month before he was playing happily with them. My daughter at age 2 1/2 was having trouble separating the English of her mother and children's books, and the Danish of her father and day care until we spent a couple of weeks in England with no Danish around. After that there was not problem keeping them separated.

So our bilingual children started school with the monolingual Danes and appeared to do as well as them, since they were learning CALP along with their Danish classmates in school...as well as, it appears, at home. Because we read to them in both languages, and discussed things with them, they were getting kid-sized CALP from us. It apparently doesn't matter which language you start doing cognitively stimulating things, as long as you do it. But even so, studies have shown that kids often need 4-7 years to catch up with their classmates when it come to CALP, the stuff that's measured for grades and standardized tests. Small children probably a little less, if they get good support at home, kids 8-14 best, it seems, and over 14 never has a chance to catch up. (Cummins, p. 73) .

Somehow it seems to me that there are parameters not being considered here:

• How much cognitive stimulation is the child getting from home (no matter in what language?)
• How old is the child - or person?
  
• What is his L1 (a language that is similar in vocabulary to English (i.e. with all the Greek and Latin academic words) or one that is very different?
• How challenging was the child's schooling in L1 before coming here?

Cummins adds a third dimension to BICS (which he calls "conversational fluency") and CALP "academic language proficiency"):

Discrete language skills reflect specific phonological, literacy and grammatical knowledge that students acquire as a result of direct instruction and both formal and informal practive (e.g. reading). Some of these ... skills are acquired early ... [including] knowledge of the letters of the alphabet, the sounds represented by the ... letters,,,, and the ability to decode written words into appropriate sounds. [Later] they will also acquire conventions about spelling, capitalization, and punctuation as well as ...grammatical rules...
(Cummins, p. 65)

Evidently some students are able to acquire convincing conversational and discrete language skills without being able to use them in academic situations. Thus both the teachers and counselors don't consider the possibility that the student is still a language learner when it comes to cognitive learning skills. Cummins argues for longer protected bilingual training, so that students can develop more of the CALP skills before being transferred to regular classes.

Language presents demands across both contextual and cognitive continua to receive and produce language. If there is sufficient external context, just as gestures and appropriate objects, language learners can understand quite well with minimal language skills. As the student learns vocabulary and cultural background, she internalizes more and more context, so that more can be understood without the external context. Similarly, the language may be cognitively undemanding, as in a conversation or an easy book, while it can become progressively more demanding, as in high school and college classes. Cummins presents a framework to show these two continua.

(Cummins, p. 67)

	Cognitively Undemanding
Context	A	C	Context
Embedded	B	D	Reduced
	Cognitively Demanding

The area A defines normal conversation (BICS), while D is the most academically challenging (CALP). According to Cummins,

the progression of academic tasks should ideally go from quadrant A ... to quadrant B ... and then to quadrant D... Cognitive challenge is essential for academic growth but the internal and external contextual support necessary for bilingual students to meet that challenge must also be built into the activities. ...Quadrant C activities ... can be useful for reinforcement or practice of particular points and for teaching discrete language skills. However, if instruction stays at the level of quadrant C ..., it risks focusing only on out-of-context drills and worksheets, ...[failing] to supply ...elements to facilitate learning: for example, cognitive challenge, affirmation of identity,and extensive comprehensible input in the target language.
(Cummins, p. 71)

Of course all students, not just English Learners, can benefit from this progression. It is very interesting to see where Cummins places worksheets as context-reduced, cognitively undemanding.

Getting back to the question of how long it takes to acquire proficiency, Cummins reports on research on students in several different countries. He concludes that students can gain "peer-appropriate" (BICS) language skills quite quickly, since the cognitive level is relatively undemanding. However, it takes students a longer time to catch up with their classmates on the more demanding classroom skills, because their classmates are "a moving target;" they are also moving on. So a language learner has to learn at a faster pace in order to catch up with her classmates, which puts enormous pressure on the students. Even though they are apparently fluent, they still need a lot of support in the classroom. It is no wonder that many of these students give up when they have to work harder than their classmates. We teachers must be aware that even seemingly well-adjusted language learners may be struggling, and provide them with the support that they need.

Message of the Statue of Liberty

I was debating whether to just put this in as a comment, or as a separate post, but the message of the Statue of Liberty is something we seem to have forgotten. I read a number of web articles about it, and chose this one: MESSAGE OF THE STATUE OF LIBERTY, The Promise of the Golden Door, by Julie Redstone.
In case you've forgotten, there is a plaque with this poem the "The New Colossus," written in 1883 by Emma Lazarus, appear on the Statue's pedestal:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name,
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Julie Redstone continues to explain what this Liberty is:

What is the Golden Door?
It is the entrance into liberty and freedom from oppression that is the promise of America - a land, a people, a way of life.

It is also the freedom of spirit and of choice that was declared an inalienable right in the Declaration of Independence - a document whose date of execution, July 4th, 1776, is inscribed on the tablet she carries. The Statue welcomes all to this door - the lost, the needy, the rejected, the exiled. She invites them to step through it into freedom.

Liberty's comforting presence is increasingly needed when the sea of world events becomes more stormy, the waves higher. In times of turbulence, her light is reassuring, her presence, a guarantor of safety.
(Redstone)

I must admit that I had always thought that the part of the poem with "Give me your tired and poor" was engraved around the statue, not just on a plaque, so I learned something here.

The women of the earlier post from Iraq finally were welcomed at the Golden Door, but it evidently "freedom from opression" might welcome a select few, but we have not been very good hosts since they got here, to help them achieve the freedom they sought. They are again "huddled masses." And the immigrants, who have given up trying to come here legally because the system is broken, may be "huddled masses" but they're not welcomed at the Golden Door.

Of course these days there are a lot of people born in this country who feel that they are part of the "huddled masses," or maybe, "yearning to be free." It is our responsibility as teachers to help our students attain what they have come to school for: their highest potential, which will give them Liberty. This means ensuring that we give them ample opportunities to learn the cognitive skills, including academic English (the topic of the next chapter) to achieve this potential.

A culture shift isn't always what you expected either

The book, Negotiating Identities, is about how to teach English learners in school, so its understanding of identity is as a foreign person arriving in a new country. However, there are similar identity conflicts when your native language is a dialect of the standard language, and when your culture and identity is very different from the dominate, educated, culture. This of course is true of many African-Americans, who speak some sort of Ebonics among themselves, or even Latinos/Latinas who have grown up in predominantly Latino culture, such as in East LA, where everyone speaks fluent, natural American, but with their own particular accent.

My first husband, A., a Dane, came from a proud and competent farm family. His mother was born is a small town, not on a farm, and conveyed her delight in reading to her children. When his eldest brother, N., finished the primary school in their farm community, he was encouraged to go to middle school in the neighboring town. There he was constantly taunted for his country-yokel dialect and his farmer ways. Nevertheless, he persisted, and got a job in a bank, which supported him to get his high school diploma and then a law degree in evening school.

My husband, A, would have none of this taunting, so he first went to a follow-up school for farm children, where he evidently developed an interest in more socialist politics, in contrast to the libertarian politics of most Danish farmers at that time. He was strong in his personal identity as he went on to a variety of jobs in industry, which he often lost because of conflicts with bosses. At some point, he decided to follow in his brother's footsteps, took evening classes to pass both middle school and high school, and was completing his second year of university studies in political science when I met him.

But A. had an identity problem. Somewhere in his schooling a teacher had convinced him that he would have to speak standard Danish (with the accepted local city accent) to succeed. He completely dropped his dialect, which I never heard him speak, even with his parents, whose dialect was so old-fashioned, that it took me several years to understand most of it. Even though he "lost" his native language, we went to the farm every weekend, where he loved working with the harvest or feeding the pigs. He appreciated his mother's influence on his book-learning as well, but in conversation always answered their dialect with standard Danish.

A. aimed at a career as a university professor, but felt that everyone who was competing with him for tenure track positions had connections through their academic family background. I don't really believe this was entirely true, although he was part of the first generation of non-middle class students who got an education beyond 7th grade. Before his generation, only about 12% became university students.

He is often quite bitter about his life - a stroke in his 40's didn't make life easier. While his parents were adamant that their children should decide their own careers (the youngest 2 remained farmers,) A. was insistent that his children should get a university education, which our son initially didn't do. This caused constant intergenerational conflict as well.

Some others I knew could easily switch between dialect with family and standard local Danish with their colleagues. (I remember feeling very honored when one of these invited me to a birthday party, where most of the others were local and family, with whom she spoke in dialect. She spoke in dialect at the party, also to me, so I felt like she had accepted me into her inner circle, almost as a native.)

Would the once very self-confident and strong A. have kept his confidence if he had accepted the language of his background? Was his denied language the most important part of his identity? He apparently dropped it voluntarily, but their were certainly outside influences that forced him to change that part of his identity instead of negotiating a space for it.

Life not what they expected

As I was beginning to think about this blog, I read an article in the LA Times about Iraqi refugees to this country, Iraqi refugees find U.S. life not what they expected. For Iraqi refuges, coming to the U.S. presents multiple conflicts. They are often part of the previously dominant Sunni culture of Iraq, often highly educated, accustomed to a high position in society, which included staff to cook and clean. But furthermore, they are coming to the country that conquered them and removed the possibility to continue the privileged life they had known. Often they will need retraining to be able to hold a position even vaguely resembling what they had known.

The article describes the travails of a woman lawyer, whose husband disappeared, and her adult daughter, who has a master's in computer science. I assume particularly the daughter speaks English somewhat fluently, and will soon be able to find work somewhat related to her education; her lawyer mother had hoped that she would at least be able to do clerical work in a law office. But this has not yet happened because of the current economic situation.

The Iraqis are some of the most educated and skilled refugees to come here, aid workers say. Used to a middle-class life, many hope to work as doctors, lawyers or accountants. But recertification is costly and time-consuming. So they are advised to at first pursue more typical refugee work as shop attendants and cleaners.
(Zavis, p 2)

They all discuss whether it would be better to return to Iraq, but then they remember why they had to flee. The new identity forced upon them here is distressing, but the life available to them - their former identity no longer exists.

"Everything in my life was destroyed, even my dreams," Ann said after mother and daughter labored over a meal that back home would have been cooked for them. [the daughter continued:] "I blame her. I'm sorry for that. . . . She always protect me. Why she can't protect me this time?"
(Zavis, p 3)

They will have to renegotiate their identity time and again in this country until they can feel comfortable with what it has become.

I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door

The text below is about half way through the graphic story "I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door," by Maira Kalman in the August 27, 2009, NYT. (You can see the story if you click the link or the text - have patience, it takes a long time to open!) As she writes, when she was sworn in as a citizen (from Israel) she was told that they would "shed our old identity and put on a NEW IDENTITY..." but the woman she met at the district office of Homeland Security for immigration told her "This nation's IDENTITY is BASED on its rich diversity... Americans can be many different things."

Of course Maira Kalman is a voluntary immigrant...

Chapter 2: The Evolution of Xenophobia

Cultural Diversity as the Enemy Within

This chapter is trying to trace the history of why some "non-dominant" groups do well in this country and some apparently do not. Cummins refers in particular to Ogbu, J. (1978) Minority education and caste, where he develops a theory of voluntary and involuntary immigrants.

Those who come here voluntarily, he theorizes, may have initial difficulties, but because they chose to come here, they use the strength of their convictions to get them past the hard part and are succesful. Particularly all the immigrants around 1900 have mostly gone on to succes - well particularly the ones from northern Europe, if you ignore the Irish; the ones from southern Europe didn't do as well. And there is the little problem with the Mexicans and many other Latinos, who apparently came here voluntarily... More recent successful voluntary immigrants are the Chinese and Punjabi Indians, he says. (Although the first Chinese who came here weren't treated very well - witness the Chino camp that has left only its name, or the destruction of Chinatown in LA.)

Of course the largest group who came here involuntarily is the former slaves, the African-Americans. But they have had a similar destiny to the Native Americans and Native Hawaiians, who were already here - and then those Mexicans (some of whom were already here, too, of course!)

..involuntary minorities are people who were brought into the united States (or any other society) against their will; for example, through slavery, conquest, colonization, or forced labor. According to Ogby, "thereafter, these minorities were often relegated to menial positions and denied true assimilations into the mainstream society."
(Cummins, p. 32)

I think instead of "brought here" it would have been better to say "brought into contact and submission." Is our problem with Mexicans (and all other Latinos/as by default) that they were here first, and we're afraid they want to take this country back again? Cummins brings a fantastic quote from an essay by Isidro Lucas (1981) Bilingual Education and the Melting Pot: Getting Burned:

There is in America a profound underground culture, that of the unmeltable populations. Blacks have proven unmeltable over the years. The only place allowed them near the melting pot was underneath it. Getting burned. Hispanics were also left out of the melting pot. Spanish has been historically preserved more among them than other languages in non-English-speaking populations. It was a shelter, a defense. (p 21-2)
(Cummins, p 36)

The Welsh Note
Originally uploaded by Canis Major

But to continue the story, these involuntary immigrants, the unmeltable ones, were subjected to enormous indignities from speaking their own language (L1) instead of English (L2) in school, for example. Mind you, the U.S. isn't the only place such things happened. Cummins quotes in a note Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley about the mistreatment of Welsh children caught talking Welsh in school.

The "Welsh note" (or Note) came into existence after the 1870 Education Act in Britain as a means of eradicatingthe Welsh language. Any child hear speaking Welsh in school had a heavy wooden placard...placed over his or her shoulders. ...If that child hear another child speaking Welsh, he or she could transfer the "Welsh not" to the other child. The child carrying this placard at the end of the day was caned.
(Cummins, p 52)

But by 1967, in what Cummins calls Phase I of Bilingual Education, some enlightened educators decided that it would be a good idea to teach students in the L1 to get started, and then gradually move them over to English.

Unfortunately this didn't last very long, because of a lawsuit in 1974, Lau (a Chinese) vs. Nichols, insisted that children weren't getting assimilated fast enough with bilingual education. They need to get into English atthe deep-end, with what became know as Basic English. If the kids don't know Basic English, how are they going to get on in school? was the thought. The court mandated that "schools take effective measures to overcome the educational disadvantages resulting from a home-school language mismatch." (Cummins, p. 41, my emphasis.)

People also started worrying that bilingual education could cause divisiveness. You only had to look to Quebec to see what happens then. (Now, the streets signs there are all in French, not even bilingual!) Cummins summarizes the conflicts of this time as: ...during this second phase the battle lines were drawn between two opposing but apparently equally plausible arguments: on the one hand, the linguistic mismatch hypothesis, which argues that children can't learn in a language they don't understand; on the other, the maximum exposure hypothesis that if children are deficient in English, then surely they require maximum exposure to English in school. The political aspects of divisiveness, "the broader set of concerns ... [about] the more general infiltration of cultural diversity into American institutions," (Cummins, p. 43) leads into the third phase, starting in 1987.

In the 1980's the organization U.S. English started its xenophobic opposition to bilingual education, getting a referendum passed in 19 states to make English the official language. (The website is scary!) They use claims like "bilingualism shuts doors" and "monolingual education opens doors to the wider world," (Cummins, p. 45) which is a contradiction in terms (and see the next posting!)

This all came to a head in 1998 (the beginning of Phase IV) when California passed Prop 227, which aims to eliminated the use of L1 as a classroom language. Luckily it includes a provision for parents to request that this be done, although not all districts care to tell parents that. There has been a lot of discussion back and forth between proponents of bilingual education (where English is started along with the L1, and content teaching gradually moves into English alone when the student is ready) to moving kids quickly through a transition class that takes about a year and then directly into mainstream classrooms. Reseach has been done on the results of the different methods, with each side infering that the other has fudged the results by not using appropriate data.

Cummins conclusion is that there is "overwhelming evidence against the maximum exposure assumption," which he believes is more based on sociopolitical reasons:

...a patently inferior form of education has been rationalized as being for children's own good and necessary to provide them with access to what U.S. English calls "the language of equal opportunity."
(Cummins, p. 51)

In a later blog post I will relate the experience of my own children learning Danish and English in Denmark with a Danish father and American mother.

The Magdalene Sisters

The Magdalene Sisters demonstrates in a movie how the 3 protagonists insisted on negotiating their identities to survive.

Tattycoram and the Magdalen Sisters

A literary example of coercive power and negotiated identity is seen in Harriet Beadle (called Tattycoram) from Dickens' Little Dorritt, as described in this exerpt from the decidedly un-academic Yahoo answers:

Tattycoram was a foundling - the family took her in. They patronised her somewhat- they had good intentions but there seems to have been a bit of self-indulgence there too. (Her former name is Harriet Beadle, the family give her the silly made up name in true slave fashion).
Tattycoram had developed a serious anger-management problem... The strong-willed Miss Wade encourages Tattycoram and eventually entices her away. (While with Miss Wade, pointedly, she reclaims her original name) ... Tattycoram eventually repents and goes back to the family ... And when she returns - you guessed it - she takes the silly name again, and submits to a sermon from her former master on the importance of submission and duty.
(Sam R.)

Certainly her "serious anger-management problem" is not unexpected, considering the position she has been forced into by her circumstances, while "the strong-willed Miss Wade" is likewise pushing her own concept of Harriet's identity. I recently saw a BBC series on Little Dorritt, where Tattycoram was portrayed as a young black woman, based on her description in the novel as "a handsome girl with lustrous dark hair and eyes, and very neatly dressed." (McLean) She was portrayed as being more a foster child of the family, who nevertheless is treated demeaningly. On the one hand, the family implies that she is a member of the family, on the other hand, she is given a childish name, taught to control her anger by counting - like a child - and dressed in much simpler fashion than the women of the family. The family think they are doing her well by rescuing her from the home, but they are coercing her into a position over which she has no control, just as the First Nation children described by Cummins were sent to schools to "improve their lot."

Schools like the one Harriet Beadle attended in Dickens' time were still going strong in Ireland until the 1990's. According to an article in the Guardian, "More than 30,000 children deemed to be petty thieves, truants or from dysfunctional families – a category that often included unmarried mothers – were sent to Ireland's austere network of industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages and hostels from the 1930s until the last facilities shut in the 1990s." (McDonald) These schools may have been called "Reformatories" but mostly demeaned the children with poor living and working conditions, as well as the sexual abuse reported in the article.

A similar story is told by the movie The Magdalen Sisters. (See Wikipedia - MS,) which demonstrates how the 3 protagonists negotiated their identities to survive.

Reflections: Chapter I: Identity and Empowerment

Chapter I analyzes how identity is related to empowerment, exemplifying the topic with 2 case studies. The first shows how a Latino community, Pajaro Valley was given empowerment over the local school and brought great changes through a literacy project. The following quote from the project report, is particularly illustrative about how empowerment and identity are linked:

Another mother said: 'Ever since I know I have no need to feel ashamed of speaking Spanish I have become strong. Now I feel I can speak with the teachers about my children's education and I can tell them I want my children to know Spanish. I have gained courage'...
(Cummins, p 7)

The second tells about one of innumerable instances where children of "inferior" backgrounds were sent to boarding schools or assigned as foster children to well-standing citizens, ostensibly to train out their inferior qualities, but actually to remove any sense of empowerment their culture might have retained in their identities. The example is of a First Nations residential school in Canada, where, according to Cummins' research, "Eradication of of Native identity was seen as a prerequisite to making students into low-level productive citizens." (Cummins, p. 9)

The process of identity negotiation in schools is a reciprocal one between educators and students. For example, in the case of First Nations students in the residential schools, educators defined their role as dispenser of salvation, civilzation and education to students who necessarily had to be defined as lacking of these qualities. In other words, the self-definition of educators required that students and their communities be defined as heathen, savage and without valid form of cultural transmission... This devaluation of identity was communicated to students in all of their interactions...
(Cummins, p. 10)

Schools of this sort were run, mostly by various church organizations, into the 1970's. Cummins goes on to report a newspaper account of a conference focused on the treatment of First Nation children,

after the community started to conquer widespread alcoholism and social problems in recent years and realized that the self-destructive behavior had been masking the pain of the residential school experience.
(Cummins, p. 11)

The pain these people had felt was described recently in a "Health" article The sting of social rejection, in the LATimes.

The hurt of social rejection or exclusion is emotional. But there must be a reason why we so often experience it -- and talk about it -- as if it were a physical pain. One feels "burned" by a partner's infidelity, "wounded" by a friend's harsh words, "heartache" when spurned by a lover.
(Healy)

The article goes on to explain that a particular class of brain cells, called my opiod receptors, which not only dampen pain when an opiate drug or the body's own painkillers are present, but also "play a key role in physical and social pain. Thus it is no wonder that this pain, which most of us recognize as causing depression, would cause people whose identity has been removed to dampen their pain with alcohol and to feel depression. The " low-level productive citizens" that were expected have become non-productive in the extreme.

Of course this has happened all over the world: Native American, Australian aborigines, Greenlandic Eskimos under the Danish colonial power (where children were sent to Denmark for middle school, and many ended up alcoholics,) to name just a few. See the next entry for some literary and real-life examples from England and Ireland.

Cummins points out that these coercive relations of power such as these assume that there is a fixed quantity of power, using zero-sum logic. However, the example from the Pajaro Valley Literacy Project demonstrates that cooperative relations of power are additive.

Power...can be generated in interpersonal and intergroup relations. ...
participants are empowered through their collaboration such that each is
affirmed in her or his identity and has a greater sense of efficacy to create
change... The power relationship is additive rather than subtractive. Power is
created with others rather than being imposed on or exercised over others.
(Cummins, p. 16)

It is obvious from the Canadian example here, and the Irish examples in the next blog entries, that coercive power is subtractive. Instead of productive citiizens, society is faced with more crime, child support, hospital bills, etc. that could have been avoided with cooperative power. If the children's own identities had been supported, rather than attempted to be annihilated.

Educators and identity negotiation

As educators, we must be very careful to help the students retain their identity, while encouraging them to add to their identity in ways that will help them achieve their potential in the society they intend to live in. If education is student centered, it is much easier for us to help students achieve this potential. In large classrooms, teacher-centered instruction becomes more dominant, as the teacher has very little opportunity to get to know each student personally. As Cummins points out:

Our interactions with students are constantly sketching a triangular set of
images.

• an image of our own identities as educators;
• an image of the identity options we highlight for our students...;
• an image of the society we hope our students will help form.
  (Cummins, p. 17)

Our teaching then includes our own image of our students' future. We must be very careful to let the students form their own future, but we can provide them a view of our version, as well as the opportunities they need. But if we force our image on the students, we are being coercive, which will only subtract from the students' own identity. The micro-interactions between teacher and student, Cummins says, "form an interpersonal ...space within which the acquisition of knowledge and formation of identity is negotiated. ...[They} consitute the most imediate determinant of student academic success or failure." (Cummins, p. 19) Cummins concludes by discussion the two lenses through which these micro-interactions can be viewed:

...the lens of the teaching-learning relationship... required to promote reading development, content knowledge and cognitive growth; ... [and] the lens of identity negotiations ... communicated by the students regarding their identies - who they are in the teacheer's eyes and who they are capable of becoming.
(Cummins, p. 21)

We educators must always be aware that our wishes and concerns for our students must include their own understanding of their identity. A student's identity is not carved in stone. It is flexible and pliable. But we do not want to break our students by removing coercively a vital part of the student's identity. It is up to us to help the students negotiate their identity between their understanding and our understanding of the world they need to be prepared for.

We ARE Americans

Professor William Perez of Claremont Graduate University has been concerned about the fate of undocumented students, many of whom do well in school and then find the door to a college education shut in their face. These students have learned to respect their identity in the classroom, but are considered as non-persons when they leave school.

In 'We ARE Americans' Profiles Undocumented Students NPR's All things Considered of August 22, 2009, host Guy Raz interviewed Professor Perez and a former undocumented student, Nora Preciado, who did prevail to become an immigration lawyer.

I think my experience is typical of a lot of undocumented students, especially as a teenager. I can only describe it as feeling invisible in this country when I was growing up.
(Raz)

When she arrived in this country she knew no English, so she was placed in remedial courses for many years, even though she had been an honors student in Mexico.
(I too experienced being "stupid" after I moved to Denmark until I learned the language and culture. I even had colleagues at the high school where I taught as a fully qualified teacher who would try to find errors in my Danish or cultural understanding, which always felt demeaning.)
But she wanted to be like the others, and ended up succeeding in high school, only to realize with shock that she couldn't attend university or even travel. But with the help of an understanding guidance counselor she managed to fulfil her dreams.

Professor Perez found that many of these young people end up in the alternative economy instead of becoming productive citizens. But the 180 students he interviewed for the book are different.

They don't really have a lot of options. I mean, the students that I profiled in the book are students that have decided to pursue that goal despite the challenges that they face. And so, you know, they work multiple jobs in addition to maintaining high grades in their classes, and also responsibilities that they have at home, a lot of them are still helping their parents.

But one of the most surprising findings was the high levels of community service that these students were involved in. Ninety percent of the students that I surveyed had participated in some form of volunteer work. Everything from food drives to voter registration, which I found, you know, particularly interesting, because even though they themselves can't vote, they wanted to make sure that other people didn't take for granted that privilege that they didn't have.
(Raz)

As the title says, these students' have "American" as part of their identity now - they ARE Americans. We must help them live that part as well. I look forward to helping all of my students achieve their potential, supported by colleagues, teachers, classmates - and of course, my students.

Reflections: Preface

I nearly called this blog Creating Power Collaboratively, since that is the emphasis right from the start. If we change the power structure of a classroom from coercive, teacher centered, to collaborative, which draws on all the individuals in the classroom, with their various identities, then there is a power structre where all can grow, including the class as a community. Jim Cummins defines empowerment in this quote:

The term empowerment entails both sociological and psychological dimensions: to create contexts of empowerment in classroom interactions involves not only establishing the respect, trust, and affirmation required for students (and educators) to reflect critically on their own experience and identities; it also challenges explicitly the devaluation of identity that many culturally diverse students and communities still experience in the society as a whole.
(Cummins, p viii)

If a student does well in class, but then is not met with respect outside the classroom, she may find that her classroom excellence is not worth the effort. The classroom must help her build confidence in her identity, so that she can meet these challenges.

As a new teacher I need concrete suggestions for how to empower my students. There may be 35 students in my class, each with a different identity (or several different identities.) How will I be able to learn all these identities so that I can support them and empower them? I hope that the chapters of this book, and my classes, classmates and teachers at CGU will provide me with some answers and techniques.

This requires that schools respect students' language and culture, encourage community participation, promote critical literacy,and institute forms of assessment that contribute to the school as a learning community rather than pathologize culturally diverse students as scapegoats for the failure of schools and society.
(Cummins, p ix)

All of our students have their own identities. Some have more difficulty defending their identity than others. African-Americans have always born the stigma of slavery, of been a 4/5 citizen. While many have learned to develop and identity that largely ignores the stigma, as we have seen recently, even college professors discover that it is lying right under the surface under certain situations. Similarly, women in this country have had more difficult access to jobs they are qualified for, and when they get those jobs, their payscale and chances for advancement are often less than men. In some countries, women are nearly invisitble in their society. Some of our students bring their own culture's view of women with them when they come to this country. We must help the girls to find their identity, and encourage both the girls and the boys to accept each other as equally valuable individuals.

Reflections: Forward: What did you bring with you to school?

This is the first of the many posts in this blog that refer specifically to chapters in the book. They will all be labeled "Reflections." Intersperced will be other postings about my own experiences, other related readings. In the right margin is a bibliography of books and articles I refer to. Some I list as I find, even though they have not yet been discussed.

Vasilia Kourtis Kazoulllis tells about her introduction to schooling in America, and about her metamorphosis from Greek child at home to American school girl, which she handled seamlessly.

I could enter an environment, immediately calculate the demands of that particular environment and act accordingly. . .I knew that each teacher had a prototype of excellence. I didn't challenge it--or try to be better than the prototype of excellence for even that was disastrous. I learned to become just that.
(Cummins, p iii)

She begins the section with an anecdote from this first experience of kindergarten. She had brought her teacher a very special koulourakia Greek cookie (see picture,) which was a sign that the family accepted her authority (and it probably was delicious.) She discovered the bag in waste basket, unopened. The teacher had kept to her own identity, but not accepted the identity of her student. As Kazoullis comments:

If I had been accepted as an individual and if individuality and not conformity had been the key to success...things would have been much easier.
(Cummins, p iii)

As she analyzes the situation, this is not a question of multicultural or intercultural education, which stress similarities and differences, but a question of individuality. It is a question of accepting each student's identity in the classroom, and making the classroom richer because of the many different flavors of identity it provides.

This is a 2-way process, of course. While the teacher should be able to recognize what makes each student individual, the student must also recognize how each classroom and each social context is individual.

Kazoullis concludes that society should derive power from collaboration, not coersion. With coercive power, someone always loses if someone wins. With collaborative power, each individual with her own identity contributes to the power of a community. This is what the favorite business term synergy is all about, or the motto United we stand, divided we fall, which doesn't mean "unified we stand" or "conforming we stand."

Negotiating my own identity

gathering in the kitchen
Originally uploaded by bonbayel

This picture shows a part of my identity that only my family knows. I am sitting in a cottage kitchen by a lake in Maine together with my husband, my mother, my daughter and my sister-in-law.

Mom and Dad lived by this lake for almost my entire adult life, while I was living in Denmark. Their home was our home in America, and it looked sort of like this.

I sometimes wonder how I could end up in California. (Hint: that guy on the left moved here and then asked me to join him.) But I think that being by a lake in Maine is hidden deep inside me.

My life has been a constant renegotiation of my identity. I went to 4 schools in 3 states (NJ, OH, PA) before college in OH, and Mom and Dad added 2 more states (TN and ME) while I was in graduate school in a 6th state, NC. And then I lived in 5 different towns in different parts of Denmark for 29 years. Moving requires a change of identity every time, even within the same state.

• I went from saying "tomahto" to "tomayto" when we moved to Ohio, to avoid being laughed at.
• Moving from HS to Oberlin College meant moving from a school where I was one of the top students to a school where everyone had been that. I no longer got straight A's, which was required a lot of renegotiating of who I was.
• I went from a future physicist to a nobody in the science department, because my competition had increased dramatically.
• So I majored in German, and became a linguist during graduate school at UNC.
• I moved to Denmark, where it took a while (at age 25) to learn the language and the culture, and where I never entirely fit in.
• I became the wife of a man who had grown up a farmer, quitting school after 7th grade, but through night classes ended up a Ph.D. from U.N.C. He had to constantly renegotiate who he was throughout his life because of class culture differences, and then later because stroke left him not able to teach or be as active as he'd been. I will write about his struggles with his identity elsewhere in this blog.
• Strangely, in Denmark, I became the scape-goat American, who was expected to defend the Viet Nam war, which I had petitioned against in 1965, to pollution, even though I have always been an avid environmentalist, to whatever else people held against Americans:
  "Just because you're an American doesn't mean you can teach English well."
  "'English' means the language of England, not the U.S.," was a battle I ran as a teacher (and my daughter, later, as a student.)
• This was aided by my becoming the mother of 2 children, who taught me the culture as they learned it in school.
• In Denmark, I was a HS teacher of German and English - grammar, which is sort of like math, but also literature, a subject I'd avoided all my life, so I constantly felt that I wasn't preparing my students properly in that area.
• I dropped that for the world of business - for which I started dressing more appropriately and had my ears pierced, so I could wear a bit of "no-fuss" jewelry. But business in Denmark was not ready for a mature, foreign woman with a university degree in the humanities, so I had to hop from one temp job to the next doing things like translations.
• I became a small business owner, developing and running a diaper service for about 5 years, never making a profit.
• This lead to studies (and a few jobs) in environmental management.
• And finally a move to California as a new wife, with a whole new barrage of identity negotiations.

Negotiating your identity

Our identity is the sum of our background and our interests. It is what we think of ourselves, but tempered by what others think of us. Our identity is based on our gender, culture, socio-economic status, religion, interests and passions, community, the larger society - and our education.

When we are in society, there will always be parts of our identity that don't quite fit in with the rest of whatever community we are in - at a job, in church, as a volunteer, and in school. We all have to learn to negotiate our identity with our surroundings, trying to keep as much as we can of the person we think we are, while adapting whatever is needed from the prevailing culture to fit in (or at least survive!)

For children school can be particularly perplexing when they find that things they take for granted are somehow unacceptable at school. This may be a handicap, the way the clothes they wear, their language, the food in their lunch box, how loud they speak, or many other things. If the school culture doesn't accept parts of the child's identity that are important to her, she may never really catch on in school.

If our role as teachers is to prepare students for the very best they will be capable of, then we teachers have to negotiate our own identities. Maybe some part of our identity is that we belong to the prevailing, "superior" culture. If we are to prepare all of our students, we must learn to accept their culture and quirks as of equal value to our own. Students must be able to accept their own culture as valued, while learning about the prevailing culture, which may be necessary for future success. Being bi-cultural and bilingual can only be a strength, because such a person is adept in several cultures and learns to be flexible.

This blog is to be an "interactive journal" of my reactions to the book shown here: Negotiating Identities, by Jim Cummins, as an assignment for my Teaching Internship Program at Claremont (CA) Graduate University. I will reflect on about one chapter a week, starting with a short summary of the chapter, then digging deaper into particular quotes or concepts, providing interaction with other readings, experience, pictures and probably YouTube videos.

Since my own personal experience includes moving several times as a child as well as living, studying, teaching and bringing up my bilingual children in Denmark for 29 years, I have very personal feelings about negotiating my own identity, and the conflicts my children experienced as well.